"I was a normal baby for 30 seconds, then ninjas stole my mamma" - Deadpool
"so what do we do?" "well jack, you stand there and say 'gee rocket raccoon I'm so glad you brought that Unfeasibly large cannon with you..' and i go like this BRAKKA BRAKKA BRAKKA" - Rocket Raccoon

Honestly, I think the massive buffs to drop rates in LFR will be enough of a catchup mechanism as is. I took two alts through the 5.0 LFR raids from scratch after they got their drop rate buff, and I was through to ToT in two weeks.

If you supplement LFR with some 476 honor gear and maybe a crafted piece or two, you can be in ToT LFR in the second week, so if the honor gear is going up ilvl again, that + droprate buffs in ToT LFR will make catching up fairly easy.

Q: Where the fuck is Xia Xia, SIU?!?!
A1: She needs to start making eggs for Easter...
A2: Drunk and sleeping somewhere.

I've spent a lot of time on the timeless isles, and can say that it is a lie. Time does in fact pass when you are on the timeless isles. I wish I could say it was time well spent, but personally, the concept of killing endless waves of mobs for little coins makes a pretty depressing and not altogether interesting experience (totally not referencing ANY other game here). I would almost even call it flat out "unenjoyable" at the risk of sounding like one of those people who can't appreciate it when Blizzard "tries" to make "fresh" "new" ideas for the game. Is it really new and fresh if we've been doing the exact same thing for the past 8 years, just with blue exclamation marks instead of the words "Self directed experience".
Sure, it's a self directed experience. You can kill mobs for hours for some vanity items. You can explore and maybe run into some events if you're lucky. You can fight some world bosses. You can do pet battles. This all sounds like something we have already been doing, we just don't have a quest to tell us when we've killed enough, or to direct us the areas that would help us the most, or quests to end in events. Now we have to seek these events out ourselves. Instead of grinding these quests for a while until we get enough reputation to earn these vanity items, we have to kill mobs for coins to get us these vanity items. World bosses are the exact same as they've always been, as are pet battles.

Any talk of this being a "new" idea is exactly what Blizzard wants us to think. I think things like the Pet battle tournament is a nice thing to add, but it could have been added somewhere else. The hub could have actually tied to the story of 5.4, or the location, or the theme. Instead we have this disconnected mess of an island full of barely disguised activities that have been repackaged and labeled as "new".

Sounds to me like Blizzard finally wizened up about how a lot of players simply despise dailies and decided to go what seems to be the GW2 route of events and what not. Atleast, this is what I'm inferring from your description of timeless isle, I haven't been on the ptr to test it (just mw monk set bonuses and a little bit of disc) though I will have to give it a shot when I get back on. Sounds interesting to say the least.

Loving the idea, well done Blizzard. Although I'm not that kind of guy who loses his hair for dailies even if you feel "forced" to do them.

Since I'm a lazy person, anyone wanna summarize the rewards on the Isle? Even if it's fun and new, there has to be something rewarding also so it lasts more than couple of weeks for people. Mounts? Gear? Pets?

What kind of real time events? Can you write something more because I'm not playing on the PTR

Like..real time events as in there's random events that happen.

For instance: there's a cave on the island. Randomly while you're exploring it there's an NPC that asks you to defend him from these ghost sailors or something, who also guard a vanity item/an item that actually summons a ship off the coast of the Timeless Isle and attacks the island/opposing faction.

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Originally Posted by Thneed

Sounds like fun. I've enjoyed the rare items and mobs in Pandaria. Gonna be a mess on PvP servers with the virtual realms.

I think Timeless Isle does a lot of things right, but it fails spectacularly when it comes to working as a gear catch up.

The mobs on the Isle are pretty hard, in that they usually have a specific ability that makes them dangerous AND high health. That's fine if the island is only meant for high ilevel chars but it contradicts itsself by dropping ilevel 496 gear, which is only useful to characters playing catch up.

Characters playing catch up however will need to kill many, many of these high health mobs that sometimes have pretty dangerous mechanics to get the gear to drop OR the coins to buy a token. (and that's not even counting the fact the process is largely RNG, in that you can't target specific slots)

Personally, I prefer the dailies + rep requirement way of getting gear to catch up above the grind-your-face-off-on-mobs way that The Barrens and Timeless Isle give you.

Isn't the 496 hear BoA? I think it's intended to farm the rares on your main and then mail the 496 gear to your alts.